The demand for systems that monitor a variety of conditions, such as monitoring homes and businesses for alarm conditions, allow users to centrally control various devices (such as thermostats, switches, cameras, appliances, etc.), monitor medical conditions, and the like continues to grow as more home and business owners seek better control over their premises and to protect it from various hazards and threats. Such threats include intrusion, fire, carbon monoxide and flooding, among others dangers, which may be monitored locally or remotely by the users, and also may be reported to a monitoring station.
Conventional security systems typically employ a control panel that receives “event” (such as triggering alarms) and other information from various sensors and devices, and are used to operate those devices. This may be done locally by the user, or remotely over a network, such as via a plain old telephone service (POTS) line, IP Broadband connections, or cellular radio. In the case of certain alarm events, a remote monitoring center may also take appropriate action, such as notifying emergency responders. Installation and servicing complexity associated with conventional security systems tends to be high as an installer typically has to physically mount a control panel onto the wall and manually configure a number of sensors. In particular, the installer has to spend lots of time manually programming and configuring the control panel and each sensor in the system, thereby slowing down the installation process and limiting the number of security systems the installer can install in a given time period. This is true as well for more recent all-in-one (AIO) security systems, in which the control panel and a user interface (such as a keypad) are combined in a single unit, and do-it-yourself (DIY) security systems.
These systems are typically limited to controlling and monitoring life safety features, such as intrusion and fire detection. In order to add life style features (such as lighting control, temperature control and remote viewing of video), an additional controller is needed, as such life style systems operate in a manner that has developed largely independent of life safety systems. These life style systems do not adhere to industry and governmental requirements that determine the specifications for, and operation of, security and other life safety systems. Life style systems provide different types of event information using different protocols, and are typically operated and managed differently than those used for monitoring life safety.
Consequently, in order to add this lifestyle capability, users have had to have separate hardware/software/service directed to controlling and monitoring these additional features. While some conventional security panels have incorporated life safety and life style systems in to the same controller, these systems similarly operate independently, e.g., using independent processing systems, to minimize the risk of the life style features interfering with the life safety operation. For example, a user viewing multiple live streams of video from various monitoring video camera around the premises might otherwise consume processing resources such that life safety operation may be interrupted due to lack of processing resources.